Editing Ernst Haeckel (section)

=== Controversy ===
Later in 1874, Haeckel's simplified embryology textbook ''Anthropogenie'' made the subject into a battleground over Darwinism aligned with Bismarck's ''[[Kulturkampf]]'' ("culture struggle") against the Catholic Church. Haeckel took particular care over the illustrations, changing to the leading zoological publisher Wilhelm Engelmann of Leipzig and obtaining from them use of illustrations from their other textbooks as well as preparing his own drawings including a dramatic double page illustration showing "early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages of 8 different vertebrates. Though Haeckel's views had attracted continuing controversy, there had been little dispute about the embryos and he had many expert supporters, but [[Wilhelm His Sr.|Wilhelm His]] revived the earlier criticisms and introduced new attacks on the 1874 illustrations.<ref>Wilhelm His. ''Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung''. F. C. W. Vogel, Leipzig 1875.</ref> 

Expert anatomists were critical of Haeckel's work. Catholic priests also opposed Haeckel's views. Specifically, Haeckel's critics accused him of manipulating the embryo drawings to make the early stages of different species look more similar. They claimed that the drawings of four-week dog and human embryos had been copied without attribution from other sources, and changed by expanding dog's head and reducing the human head, moving the eye, and exaggerating the size of the human tail.  Haeckel himself considered the drawings stylized and illustrative, but his detractors considered them forgery and fraud.<ref name=hopwood2006 />{{rp|270-271,288–296,299}}

While it has been widely claimed that Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court at Jena, there does not appear to be an independently verifiable source for this claim.<ref>{{citation|last=Richards|first=Robert J.|author-link=Robert J. Richards|title=Ernst Haeckel and the Struggles over Evolution and Religion|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=byJk8Ea0WSQC&pg=PA89|access-date=22 February 2016|volume=10|year=2005|publisher=Universitätsverlag Göttingen|isbn=978-3-938616-39-0|pages=89–115|journal=Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology}}</ref> Recent analyses (Richardson 1998, Richardson and Keuck 2002) have found that some of the criticisms of Haeckel's embryo drawings were legitimate,{{citation needed|date=March 2025}} but others were unfounded.<ref>Michael K. Richardson. 1998. "Haeckel's embryos continued". ''Science'' 281:1289, quoted in NaturalScience.com webpage [http://naturalscience.com/ns/letters/ns_let17.html Re: ''Ontogeny and phylogeny''] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061114003612/http://naturalscience.com/ns/letters/ns_let17.html |date=14 November 2006 }}: A Letter from Richard Bassetti; Editor's note.</ref><ref>"While some criticisms of the drawings are legitimate, others are more tendentious", Richardson and Keuck "Haeckel's ABC of evolution and development", ''Biol. Rev.'' (2002), '''77''', pp. 495–528. Quoted from p. 495.</ref> There were multiple versions of the embryo drawings, and Haeckel rejected the claims of fraud. It was later said that "there is evidence of sleight of hand" on both sides of the feud between Haeckel and [[Wilhelm His Sr.|Wilhelm His]].<ref>Richardson & Keuck 2001. See for example, their Fig. 7, showing His's drawing of the forelimb of a deer embryo developing a clef, compared with a similar drawing (Sakurai, 1906) showing the forelimb initially developing as a digital plate with rays. Richardson and Keuck say "Unfortunately His's embryos are mostly at later stages than the nearly identical early stage embryos illustrated by Haeckel [top row of Haeckel's drawing]. Thus they do not inform the debate and may themselves be disingenuous." p. 518.</ref> [[Robert J. Richards]], in a paper published in 2008, defends the case for Haeckel, shedding doubt against the fraud accusations based on the material used for comparison with what Haeckel could access at the time.<ref>{{Cite journal|title=Haeckel's embryos: fraud not proven |first=Robert J. | last=Richards |journal=Biology & Philosophy |year=2009 |volume=24 |pages=147–154 |doi=10.1007/s10539-008-9140-z |citeseerx=10.1.1.591.9350 |s2cid=13416916 |url=http://home.uchicago.edu/~rjr6/articles/Haeckel--fraud%20not%20proven.pdf}}</ref>